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If you build a computer with the intention of using proprietary drivers then nVidia is obviously the only good choice... But most people don't need the proprietary drivers, in which case AMD is the best choice.

Lets be honest, most people with AMD cards will need their proprietary driver anyways for power management (laptop users), which won't change until the 3.11 kernel which is still a bit away (and then however long it takes distros to merge these changes). As of today, I would think Intel has to be the way to go for free/open drivers as their support is pretty solid performance wise and feature wise, although, as I just said, AMD seems to be catching up quickly. However, Intel's performance difference between the open drivers (linux) and their closed driver (windows) does seem to be far less than the difference between AMD's open and closed drivers. Hopefully that also gets a nice boost at some point

Lets be honest, most people with AMD cards will need their proprietary driver anyways for power management (laptop users), which won't change until the 3.11 kernel which is still a bit away (and then however long it takes distros to merge these changes). As of today, I would think Intel has to be the way to go for free/open drivers as their support is pretty solid performance wise and feature wise, although, as I just said, AMD seems to be catching up quickly. However, Intel's performance difference between the open drivers (linux) and their closed driver (windows) does seem to be far less than the difference between AMD's open and closed drivers. Hopefully that also gets a nice boost at some point

I do agree with you about power management, but at this point it is just a matter of time. The initial code is already released. I don't agree with you about performance. If you choose a chip which uses the r600g driver then there isnt anything to worry about. It's prformance has already exceeded expectations.

Lets be honest, most people with AMD cards will need their proprietary driver anyways for power management (laptop users), which won't change until the 3.11 kernel which is still a bit away (and then however long it takes distros to merge these changes). As of today, I would think Intel has to be the way to go for free/open drivers as their support is pretty solid performance wise and feature wise, although, as I just said, AMD seems to be catching up quickly. However, Intel's performance difference between the open drivers (linux) and their closed driver (windows) does seem to be far less than the difference between AMD's open and closed drivers. Hopefully that also gets a nice boost at some point

Since the release of UVD and DPM support for the radeon driver, there is nothing that the Intel driver does better. And the performance delta compared to Windows is rendered moot by having much faster hardware. And even if you are waiting for the official 3.11 kernel, it just means using profile-based power saving for a little while longer.

What Intel still has at this point is faster support for the very latest chipsets.

Since the release of UVD and DPM support for the radeon driver, there is nothing that the Intel driver does better

It remains to be seen how effective the power management will be. Some users still complain of overheating even when underclocking using "low" profile. Hopefully, the other power management features rectify that.

It remains to be seen how effective the power management will be. Some users still complain of overheating even when underclocking using "low" profile. Hopefully, the other power management features rectify that.

I'm guessing that you are refering to the old static power management code that was never adequate. Recently AMD released code for proper dynamic power management that should fix all that. We'll see how good it is after it has matured some. It appears to be a little buggy right now.

The 325.08 Beta driver looks like it fixes some of the problems I been having with my GeForce8 8400M GS, but now do not need fancy graphics since I just use Intel graphics. I also switched back to desktops.

Wow. Not one single comment on this entire thread about the new drivers. Nothing about differences in performance, functionality, anything like that. Just silly posturing from people wanting to post a picture of Torvald's famous bird flipping picture. Lovely.

Wow. Not one single comment on this entire thread about the new drivers. Nothing about differences in performance, functionality, anything like that. Just silly posturing from people wanting to post a picture of Torvald's famous bird flipping picture. Lovely.

Drops support for old 2.4 kernels, yet still doesn't support anything beyond 3.8(?) without having to apply a patch first?

Hmmm....

Interesting, i haven't updated (yet), or anything like that. I guess it's good (for me, personally) that i am still on 3.8.13 then. (even though, patching isn't a huge ordeal).

on a different note:

I wonder how the performance is vs. 319.17/23 and/or what benefits this new beta may have, aside from mentioned bits? I am still getting non-fatal errors when using -rt patched kernel, in dmesg occasionally. I'd love to see the day when nvidia puts some (more) effort into improving their driver for RT kernels, ensuring the best performance, at lower latencies, and such. ~ but overall that isn't really a complaint, nvidia tends to serve me quite well, and has for a very long time.

anyway, i suppose i should checkout / update to this driver in the next day or so.